Auditory Physiology

Auditory textures such as the sound of running water, rain, fire, wind, or insects are readily recognized by our auditory system. We study running water and showed its sound has many interesting physical features, such as scale invariance. We use these features to create artificially synthesized versions of such sounds. These synthetic versions are powerful tools to use in neurophysiology, because they are at the same time ecologically-relevant sounds to all terrestrial vertebrate species, and fully controlled.